The Resemblance of Twins with Regard to Perseveration

1935 ◽  
Vol 81 (334) ◽  
pp. 489-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Pratt Yule

The social behaviour which is the material of psychological observation at any given time is the product of a certain genetic constitution on the one hand, and of a complex process of social, educational, familial and, to some extent, uterine environment on the other. The social behaviour of human beings cannot be subjected to direct methods of genetic analysis. The genetic psychologist may be compared to the astronomer, in so far as he has to rely on Nature to perform the experiments which he himself is unable to undertake. To the category of such experiments belongs the phenomenon of twin production. In the production of monozygotic twins Nature provides us with individuals of the same genetic constitution. Such differences as they exhibit arise uniquely from the operation of differences in the environment in which they are placed. In ordinary circumstances they share many more features of environment than any other two individuals selected at random from the population. When reared together, the extent of their dissimilarity can only throw light on such differences of nurture as may operate on members of the same family unit and of the same age. If they are reared apart, the measure of resemblance exhibited by monozygotic twins may throw light on the influence of social environment in a less restricted sense. With a sufficiently large sample of twins reared apart, a satisfactory standard of comparison for assessing the extent of resemblance due to genetic constitution, plus the effects of a common uterine environment, would be provided by the degree of resemblance existing between their foster sibs in families into which they have been adopted. Such data cannot be collected easily. As yet they do not exist in sufficient quantity to yield satisfactory conclusions.

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-434
Author(s):  
C. Gräser-Herrmann ◽  
H. H. Sambraus

Abstract. East Friesian dairy sheep are on the one hand loners and individualists. In practice, however, it has become increasingly common to keep animals of this breed in larger herds too. The social behaviour was examined as well as the marching and milking order of three herds with 24, 35 and 39 lactating ewes. In all three herds a marked social ranking could be proven. The social rank was correlated with both the age and the weight of the animal. A significant relationship was found in two of the three herds between rank and milk yield. As well as this, it was proven that East Friesian dairy sheep have quite a marked marching and milking order. Each animal constantly takes on more-or-less the same position in the order. The close bond of this breed with human beings seems to be a result of intensive contact with the animals. No reason was found to prevent the East Friesian dairy sheep being kept in groups of around 40 animals. This can be done on condition that the animals have adequate room and access to the resources satisfying their needs.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Dalsgaard

This article refers to carbon valuation as the practice of ascribing value to, and assessing the value of, actions and objects in terms of carbon emissions. Due to the pervasiveness of carbon emissions in the actions and objects of everyday lives of human beings, the making of carbon offsets and credits offers almost unlimited repertoires of alternatives to be included in contemporary carbon valuation schemes. Consequently, the article unpacks how discussions of carbon valuation are interpreted through different registers of alternatives - as the commensuration and substitution of variants on the one hand, and the confrontational comparison of radical difference on the other. Through the reading of a wide selection of the social science literature on carbon markets and trading, the article argues that the value of carbon emissions itself depends on the construction of alternative, hypothetical scenarios, and that emissions have become both a moral and a virtual measure pitting diverse forms of actualised actions or objects against each other or against corresponding nonactions and non-objects as alternatives.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 125-144
Author(s):  
Jesús Víctor Alfredo Contreras Ugarte

Summary: Reflecting on the role humans take into nowadays society, should be of interest in all our social reflections, even for those that refer to the field of law. Any human indifferent and unconscious of the social role that he ought to play within society, as a member of it, is an irresponsible human detached from everything that surrounds him, regarding matters and other humans. Trying to isolate in an irresponsible, passive and comfortable attitude, means, after all, denying oneself, denying our nature, as the social being every human is. This is the reflection that this academic work entitles, the one made from the point of view of the Italian philosopher Rodolfo Mondolfo. From a descriptive development, starting from this renowned author, I will develop ideas that will warn the importance that human protagonism have, in this human product so call society. From a descriptive development, from this well-known author, I will be prescribing ideas that will warn the importance of the protagonism that all human beings have, in that human product that we call society. I have used the descriptive method to approach the positions of the Italian humanist philosopher and, for my assessments, I have used the prescriptive method from an eminently critical and deductive procedural position. My goal is to demonstrate, from the humanist postulates of Rodolfo Mondolfo, the hypothesis about the leading, decision-making and determining role that the human being has within society. I understand, to have reached the demonstration of the aforementioned hypothesis, because, after the analyzed, there is no doubt, that the human being is not one more existence in the development of societies; its role is decisive in determining the human present and the future that will house the next societies and generations of our historical future.


1934 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 105-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Herrman ◽  
Lancelot Hogben

The characteristics of social behaviour in man are conditioned by previous experience. What is observed is the product on the one hand of a certain genetic constitution and on the other of an intricate, prolonged, and at present largely obscure, process of training and physical environment, including both the environment of the fœtus and family influences, social and physical. The experimental methods for detecting differences due to single gene substitutions cannot be applied directly. Indeed, we can see no immediate prospect of applying to social behaviour methods of genetic analysis such as have led to the mapping of the chromosomes in animals and in plants. With methods available at present, genetic inquiry can undertake to detect whether any gene differences are associated with observed differences, and whether such gene differences are recognisable throughout a comparatively wide or narrow range of social and physical environment.


2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey B. Samuel

The western adaptation of non-western medical systems and traditions is a complex process that takes place at a variety of different levels. In many practical medical contexts, epistemological issues receive little attention. Both patients and practitioners may switch frameworks relatively freely, without much concern about underlying theoretical assumptions. Epistemological issues may be more central elsewhere, for example in regard to the licensing and approval of practitioners and medicinal substances, or in terms of the rethinking of western models of knowledge to include new insights from these non-western sources. I suggest in this paper that the major learned medical traditions of Asia, such as āyurveda and traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Tibetan medicine, for all their differences from biomedicine and among each other, are in some respects relatively compatible with western biomedical understandings. They can be read in physiological terms, as referring to a vocabulary of bodily processes that underlie health and disease. Such approaches, however, marginalise or exclude elements that disrupt this compatibility (e.g. references to divinatory procedures, spirit attack or flows of subtle 'energies'). Other non-western healing practices, such as those in which spirit attack, 'soul loss' or 'shamanic' procedures are more central, are less easily assimilated to biomedical models, and may simply be dismissed as incompatible with modern scientific understandings. Rather than assenting to physiological reduction in the one case, and dismissal as pre-scientific in the other, we should look for a wider context of understanding within which both kinds of approach can be seen as part of a coherent view of human beings and human existence.


Africa ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. E. Evans-Pritchard

Opening ParagraphThere are few, if any, African societies which do not believe in witchcraft of one type or another. These types can be classified and their areas of distribution marked out. Thus we have the ‘evil eye’ type, the likundu type, and the kindoki type, and doubtless other variations could be distinguished. But though some notion which we can describe as a belief in witchcraft is found in maybe every African society it is far from playing a uniform part in each. In many communities, including the one from which the information used in this paper was gathered, witchcraft is a function of a wide range of social behaviour, while in others it has little ideological importance. In this paper my conclusions about the social relations of the witchcraft concept are drawn from twenty months experience of the Azande nation of the Nile-Uelle divide, where witchcraft is a ubiquitous notion. Whether what is true of this people is true of many other African communities I cannot say.


Africa ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 252-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Middleton

Opening ParagraphIn this paper I consider some Lugbara notions about witches, ghosts, and other agents who bring sickness to human beings. I do not discuss the relationship of these notions, and the behaviour associated with them, to the social structure. The two aspects, ideological and structural, are intimately connected, but it is possible to discuss them separately: on the one hand, to present the ideology as a system consistent within itself and, on the other, to show the way in which it is part of the total social system. Here I attempt only the former.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sébastien Roman

In The Course of Recognition, Paul Ricœur pays special attention to Honneth’s social theory, on the one hand, because it is devoted to the important issue of the struggles for recognition and, on the other hand, because Axel Honneth proposes a convincing neo-Hegelian conception of social justice. However, while adhering to Honneth’s project, Ricœur establishes a dialectical relationship between love and justice, in order to correct an inherent defect of Anerkennung. The reference to agápē would provide the only way out of the endless struggle, by demonstrating that human beings are capable of mutual recognition through the social practice of gift/counter-gift. Ricœur presents agápē as a simple add-on to the Honnethian project. The present paper returns to this assertion, and demonstrates that, on the contrary, the use of agápē alters the struggles for recognition, and does not help us to arrive at a conception of social justice, which is capable of revealing experiences of injustice and combatting them.


Author(s):  
Tommaso Bertolotti

Over the past years, mass media increasingly identified many aspects of social networking with those of established social practices such as gossip. This produced two main outcomes: on the one hand, social networks users were described as gossipers mainly aiming at invading their friends’ and acquaintances’ privacy; on the other hand the potentially violent consequences of social networking were legitimated by referring to a series of recent studies stressing the importance of gossip for the social evolution of human beings. This paper explores the differences between the two kinds of gossip-related sociability, the traditional one and the technologically structured one (where the social framework coincides with the technological one, as in social networking websites). The aim of this reflection is to add to the critical knowledge available today about the effects that transparent technologies have on everyday life, especially as far as the social implications are concerned, in order to prevent (or contrast) those “ignorance bubbles” whose outcomes can be already dramatic.


2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-98
Author(s):  
John M. Cobin ◽  

The only true scarce resource is the human mind. Yet abortion is perhaps the most potent enemy of the human mind, since it destroys the one thing in life that cannot be replaced. Ecmomic analysis suggests that abortion policy will fail to serve the public iruerest due to public choice and knowledge problems, and it will adversely distort beneficial market phenomena like adoption services. Even if markets fail to produce zero unwanted pregnancies, it is not clear that abortion policy has avoided more tragic government failures. Theologians argue that killing innocent human beings is moral turpitude, since an irreplaceable soul is lost. But abortion is also a huge social loss in an economic sense. Society loses from legalized abortion by losing a mind and from the social costs that devolve from destroying that mind. Hence, classical liberals should embrace the recent pro-life momentum.


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